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There is a rough atmosphere at the Tate Modern Gallery in London. In the last days an image, which should have belonged to the rich range of works for the exhibition “Pop Life: Art in A Material World” has raised a number of polemics which have led, for now, to a temporary censorship. The Tate Modern has withdrawn a controversial photo of the actress Brooke Shields when she was very young, after a visit of the police, concerned about a possible breach of the laws on child pornography.
The object of the scandal, displayed on various occasions in the United States but never in Great Britain, portrays Shields naked at the age of 10, in a bathtub with her face heavily made up and her body covered with oil in an attitude, which has caused activists for child support campaigns to revolt, condemning the photo and defining it “a magnet” for paedophiles.
The image, now owned by artist Richard Prince, who has called it Spiritual America, had been placed in a room of the Tate, closed behind a door that bore a written warning about its “ambiguous” content, but all of the visitors who went to the inauguration of the exhibition found the door already closed. Therefore, the prestigious museum had thought about a possible reaction of the public – considering that that photo has been object of polemics for a long time – and before displaying it, it had even sought legal advice. Prince’s work is actually the photo of a photo: the original was taken by American photographer Garry Gross, in 1975, commissioned by Brooke Shields’s mother, who was anxious to make her child become a little star. Therefore, the fame-driven mother gave up all the rights of that photo, and others taken by Gross, to the photographer for him to use them as he believed most appropriate. Afterwards, apparently the image was even given to Playboy for a publication and Gross decided to make a poster of it. Then, in 1981, Shields unsuccessfully tried to get the negatives back and started a legal battle against Gross. At the time the judge ruled that she was the “unfortunate victim of a contract … to which she had been bound by two grasping adults”. Gross, now seventy-one, commented what has happened in these days saying: “The photo was infamous since the day I took it, and that is how I wanted it to be”. The photographer added that he does not consider the photo pornographic although he admits that Shields “was meant to look like a sexy woman”. “To be considered pornographic here, she should have done something sensual or sexual”. But this is not the case. She is simply sitting in the bathtub”.
It must be said that the demonized image was conceived to be placed next to another, in which Shields was not wearing make-up and had a clean child’s face. Actually, doing some research and observing the entire photographic shooting, everything takes on a different aspect, as there are very beautiful portraits, of an intense childish tenderness.
Gross continued defending himself for that work saying: “It certainly does not breach the laws on child pornography because a judge said so” – referring to the sentence of the American judge who in 1983 sentenced that the photos taken “were not sexually tendentious, provocative or pornographic”.
Activists for child rights do not agree and they have criticised the Tate for displaying the image. They claim that, given the very young age of Brooke Shields when the photos were taken, she could not have given her consent for the images and that therefore she was taken advantage of to attract people to exhibitions. In substance, exploiting her image as a bait was, according to English conformists, a deplorable move, aggravated by the tone of the photo which, according to them, is on the borderline of paedo-pornography. Even the choice of the Tate Modern, to protect the image inside a room with a warning, was interpreted as an encouragement to a situation of intimacy and shady atmosphere, hich could incentivise even more the curiosity of paedophiles.
The Tate gallery now can only wait for instructions by the institutions which are dealing with the case. On the other hand, the police, through a spokesperson, has communicated that “The agents of the Obscene Publications Unit have met with the staff of the Tate Modern about the image. The agents have specialised experience in this field and are anxious to work with the management of the gallery to guarantee that they do not unintentionally breach the law and offend their visitors”.
If I observe this image I believe that the activists’ point of view is only partly understandable: not the content of this photo but rather the use that has been made of it and what its history represents may result to be dirty or vulgar. It is not the object of the provocation that should be blamed, but who observes it. Moreover, paedophilia is certainly not determined by the attitude of a child, even if this is remotely or playfully provocative, but by the mental deviation of a person, who translates even the tender and total candour of an innocent being into a seductive invitation. And even if it were not so, I fear that even Lolita, Nabokov’s novel, would have already been banned from bookshops, but I believe that nobody has dared to censor so heavily this literary masterpiece, although its content is definitely more explicit than this photo.
Tags: He Sen, Richard Prince
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